Ralph Ellison has been called the preeminent African-American author of the 20th century, though he published only one novel, Invisible Man, in 1952. Associate professor of English Adam Bradley’s Ralph Ellison in Progress is the first book to survey the expansive geography of the second novel that Ellison had been composing for more than 40 years, but never published before he died. Bradley pieced together the thousands of pages Ellison left behind and released his unfinished second novel, Three Days Before the Shooting in January, 2010. Additionally, Ralph Ellison in Progress re-imagines the more familiar, but often misunderstood, territory of Invisible Man and works from the premise that understanding Ellison’s process of composition imparts important truths not only about the author himself but about race, writing and American identity.
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